I’m joined by Tucker Max owner and founder of Scribe media. We reveal the secret to making those big life-changing moves that you’ve been dreaming of. Our conversation in the podcast ranges from how to talk to your kids about Santa Claus, writing books, renting a car with “walk-away” insurance and his psychology hacks for a successful life.
Adam: I want to go back in time because of you I can now never rent a car the same way again. It was all because of a story you told about getting maximum insurance on a car, the walk-away insurance. Do you remember that?
Tucker: Oh yes. I was there for that.
Adam: Yeah, I figured you were. My question for you is did that come about because of this idea of just completely telling the truth? Because, in essence, that is how insurance is sold. It’s like, the truth is you can walk away and they don’t expect anybody to actually utilize that.
Tucker: Yeah, because most people live, like I was having a conversation at lunch about why I’m not going to send my kids to public school. It has nothing to do with getting a better education because most private schools are just as much of an education. It’s because public school teaches kids to be sheep to obey. I don’t obey, that’s not my thing and it’s served me very well in life so I’m not going to ask my children to do anything different.
I don’t obey, that’s not my thing and it’s served me very well”
So if they want to obey, they obviously have that choice, but I’m not going to put them in a prison and tell them to sit down and obey for eight hours. Most people do obey. They went to school and that’s what they were taught. That’s what their parents did, that’s who they are. Okay, cool. No problem. I’m just not going to do it.
So like, maximum insurance for a rental car is called, it’s literally called Walk Away Insurance. I was at a bachelor party with my friends 10 years ago and I rented the car. I go to the front desk and I’m like, I want full insurance, but let me get this very clear, no matter what happens, no matter whose fault it is, I don’t have to pay for anything, right? And she said, “yeah that’s right. Everything’s fully covered.”
I said, “even if I come back and give you a smoking steaming pile of metal that used to be the car, we’re good?” And she’s like, yeah, we’re good. I’m like, Okay, all right…
So my friends and I of course destroyed the car. It was comical, the whole story’s in the book. But basically, I come back two days later or whatever and I hand her the keys and I’m like, all right, I’ll see you guys. And she goes outside to look at the car and comes running at me, screaming, Mr. Max! Mr. Max! yelling about the car.
I’m like, hold on, I bought walkaway insurance. She’s like, yeah. I’m like, well it’s not walk away insurance if I can’t just walk away, and then walked away. She was so stunned. I don’t know if she was angry or just didn’t know what to do or whatever. I got on the plane and I never heard about it again.
Adam: That’s amazing. I mean, at least we know that walkaway insurance truly is walkaway insurance, that’s the main thing.
Tucker: It was from this dealership when I bought it or from this company. They may have changed it since I don’t know. But yeah, I didn’t have to pay for anything.
How to write a book with Tucker Max
Adam: It’s not walk-away insurance unless you’re Tucker Max, that’s the key element there. So we’re drawing up to the end in a second. I do want to ask you for your psychological hacks, but before we get to it if somebody is interested in Scribe and they want to learn more about what you do, what’s the best way for them to go about reaching out to you guys and learning more?
Tucker: Just go to scribewriting.com if you want to write a book, we’re basically the best company. Our services are by far the best.
Then we also have what we call Scribe Book School. So like, if you can’t afford us, everything we do, we have full info courses for free. Most companies sell this stuff for $2,000, of course, we give away better for free. So just go to, if you can’t afford us, go to scribebookschool.com. If you can, go to scribewriting.com.
Adam: I freaking love that, that’s so amazing. So there you have it. So go to scribewriting.com or scribebookschool.com. Alright, so let’s finish up. What is a simple psychological hack you give somebody to help them be more successful or to get their mind right for their business?
Tucker: There’s so many, you got to give me an area because I could talk for hours just about that stuff.
How to do things even when you don’t want to
Adam: All right, let’s do the biggest one that comes up, people that know they need to do something, but they don’t do it.
Tucker: Oh, okay, all right, that’s a good one. It’s going to one-up you though. I’m going to tell you if you do this, it’s going to spin you out, but if you stay with it, it’ll get you through.
OK, what you have to do is, let’s say I need to write this book or something and I’m not writing it or I need to lose weight. That’s a better one. I need to lose weight and I’m not doing it. I’m not doing anything and I need to do to lose weight. Ask yourself one question, a really honest answer though. What am I getting from not doing it?
That’s what you got to dig through. It’s like if I’m fat and I’m a hundred pounds overweight, of course, I say I want to lose weight, but I’m not doing anything to lose weight or I do it and I sabotage myself. The point is whatever the cycle is, I’m not losing weight. The conversation I need to have with myself is, what am I getting from staying this way? Because clearly what I’m getting is worth more than this desire I say I have.
Adam: So it’s like the taste of eating donuts?
Tucker: No, no, no, It’s not. It’s way deeper than that because you can get sugar-free stuff. It’s not going to make you fat. So let’s take weight loss because it’s a really good one.
For most people, being fat is a way to hide. That’s what fat is in America. Being overweight in America means you’ve given up. It means you’re invisible. That’s why you see so many women who’ve been victims of sexual assaults or stuff like that put on a huge amount of weight. It’s an unconscious psychological defense because if I’m huge, then I’m not attractive anymore, and I’m not going to be victimized. It’s a way to be invisible.
For guys it’s different, but it’s usually a form of I’m too ashamed of myself, I don’t think I can do anything. So if I’m fat, I have an excuse. It’s okay that I’m not good at stuff because I’m invisible anyway. It’s a way of hiding.
You usually need someone to be a mirror for you. And I’m not talking about like you’re procrastinating for a couple of days, right? If you are not making wholesale changes that you swear you want to make. You need to ask the question that will unlock it if you’re willing to be honest with yourself, it’s “what am I getting by staying this way?”
What am I getting by staying this way?
Adam: I like it because like you said, they’re more motivated to get what they’re getting than to get the thing that they say they want.
Tucker: Right, and it’s always unconscious. It’s never obvious. Never in a million years.
Therapy Can Work
Adam: If somebody’s struggling to work out what that thing is, is there a way they can find it?
Tucker: I mean, therapy can work. The thing that I’ve done, as I said, the thing that’s unlocked so much for me over the last 18 months has been MDMA therapy and psilocybin therapy. They have been the most game-changing thing. It’s probably the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life are those therapies.
I did four years of serious intense psychoanalysis, which is like a form of talk therapy. For four years, four days a week, it helped me a lot. But basically, all it did was give me a map of my mind. I didn’t change a whole lot and solve a whole lot because to make real change, you’ve got to feel the emotions behind stuff.
I just wasn’t feeling anything from that. So what plant medicines have done is unlocked that. I’ve felt my feelings, all the hidden pushed down, repressed, painful stuff that I don’t want to feel, I’ve felt and it has totally unlocked my life. I can’t say enough about it.
Adam: That’s awesome. It’s funny, I know like many different people have done something similar, like various forms of that from Ayahuasca through to MDMA therapy. It always seems to go exactly the same way you did except for two cases.
I know two people but don’t know what type they did or if they did it wrong. But two people that did it ended up giving up their business, convincing themselves that they didn’t want to do anything, going on vacation for two years, and then trying to claw their way back into the business they were in before.
I can only assume that maybe they did it because it was only two. Everybody else loved it as you said, and I can only assume that maybe they started self-medicating maybe or did some alternative version.
But almost everybody I’ve heard has had a similar experience too except these two. I’m curious if you had any insight into what happened? Because both of them had super successful businesses. One of them walked in one day and was like, everyone gets a pay rise and I’m out, like that was it.
Tucker: Without knowing anything about the details, this is speculation, but I guess that they were on track of something and they weren’t willing to follow it all the way through. They did whatever medicine they did. I actually wrote two pieces about this. You can Google Tucker Max MDMA and then Tucker Max Lotus flower and they’ll come up.
The MDMA piece is about my first two MDMA sessions and the Lotus flower piece is about this strategy I recommend people take. I think you should start with MDMA and then do mushrooms or LSD then do Ayahuasca.
A lot of people start with Ayahuasca, which is a major mistake because most people just can’t handle it at all. So they probably started with a very strong plant medicine, like Ayahuasca or a very high dose of LSD or a mushroom session or something like that. Then what they realized is they hate everything about their life or they hate their business or whatever.
Adam: Yep. That this sounds accurate.
Tucker: Right? So then they gave it away and they dropped it. Now here’s the problem. If you stop there, I’ve seen people start and have amazing revelations that will a hundred percent upend their entire life. Then they’ll go 20% of the way and then stop. But you can’t do that!
It’s like if you’re trying to go grocery shopping, driving a mile to Whole Foods if it’s four miles away, isn’t going to get you anything. It’s the same thing. If one session’s enough, that’s cool for most people, but one’s not enough.
You’ve got to do multiple sessions and more important than the sessions is you’ve got to integrate. Meaning you’ve got to do all of the work to deal with everything that comes up. So think of it like in the session, all these issues are going to pop up.
You’ve got to do a lot of therapy afterward, to think and feel your way through those issues, to understand what they mean and understand how they apply to your life. I’ve seen this happen where someone will do a session and they will realize they have a horrible family who treated them bad, and they’ll try to bring this up with their family and their family will freak out because that’s what abusers, manipulators, narcissists, and gaslighters do, they fight that.
Then they’ll just stop and be like, okay, I guess it wasn’t true. They’ll stir up all this and then try and walk it back. That doesn’t work. If you’re not willing to go all the way, I wouldn’t recommend starting the journey.
Adam: Dude, I love that. I think that’s absolutely huge. What you’re saying resonates because that is exactly what happened with both these people. Then they tried to claw their way back into the business they had before.
Tucker: The same thing that they hated. Now they have to tell themselves the whole story about why they’re going back to something they hated. What they have to do is keep going. When you’re going through hell, keep going, definitely don’t try and go backward. Then you’re just stepping back through hell again.
Adam: And this is from somebody who wrote all about hell. Let’s be real.
Tucker: Yeah, for real. I mean, I went through it.
Do they serve beer in hell?
Adam: Did they serve beer? That’s the one thing I need to know.
Tucker: You know, what’s funny? This is gonna sound crazy, but when I did a very intense mushroom session, not early but later, it was one of the things that came up while I was on psychedelic.
So I’m not trying to tell you this is a placebo, a double-blind placebo tested, scientifically validated information. I came up on mushrooms so take it for what it is. But one of the things that came up is that we’re already in hell.
Literally, this is hell and not hell the way you think of hell as fire and brimstone, that that place doesn’t exist. This is hell and all this universe and this reality is, is a testing ground, a proving ground for our souls. Exactly what the Buddhists say, is that you get a bunch of lives to refine yourself and evolve to a higher level.
If you don’t, you get recycled and if you do, then you move on to a different level plane of existence. By the way, I’m not the first person to come up with this. It’s in the Tibetan book of the dead, all the way through all kinds of other people have said this,
Adam: All right, wait, you’re tripping me out because one of my mentors did an Ayahuasca session and told me this same story! But I know he didn’t read anything about Buddhism or Tibetan books of the dead, but he told me the same story. This is what happened to him.
Tucker: Do you know how sometimes you experience something as a hundred percent true, but you’re like, look, I can’t prove this to anyone else? That’s exactly what I feel about this. It felt to me as if I experienced it as a hundred percent true. I know Buddhi in the west, I knew the Tibetan book of the dead and I’m like, this is just kooky in college.
I’m like, this is an interesting metaphor in a story and all this stuff, but the idea that it connected to reality didn’t occur to me! Then I did eight and a half grams of mushrooms and I’m like, oh, of course, this is true.
This is everything they said and is exactly right like it made total sense. Again, I can’t take you there, I can’t prove it to you, it sounds crazy and if you think I’m crazy, I don’t blame you. 18 months ago, if you’d said this to me, I’d be like, Adam, dude, you got to stop doing so much, but there you go.
Adam: I love this man. Thank you. Thank you so much for the insight in sharing this. So there you have it guys. This is Tucker max. I strongly recommend The Ego and check out his book writing stuff, and just him in general. I really appreciate and admire you, man. You’re a great guy. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us.
Tucker: Thanks, Adam. Thanks for having me.
To listen to the full episode of the most comprehensive podcast about strategically building and growing your business, the S.M.A.R.T way, click on any one of these platforms and subscribe!
Links
- The Ego
- Tibetan Book of the Dead
- Buddhism
- Ayahuasca
- Double-blind Placebo test
- MDMA
- MDMA therapy
- Psilocybin therapy
- Scribebookschool.com
- Scribewriting.com
- Walk Away Insurance
- Santa Claus
- Cortisol
- Ghostbusters
- Scam School
- Test Tube
- Ryan Deiss
- SouthXSouthwest
- Epic Meal Time
- Harley Morenstein
- Discovery Channel TV
- Michelle Obama
- David Goggins
- Tiffany Haddish
- Scribe Media
- Lewis School of Greatness Podcast
- I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
- Tucker Max
